Site Mobile Navigation

Review/Film; 'The Blob,' Modernized

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996.
To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems.
Please send reports of such problems to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.

Modern technology has yielded at least one definite advance in the last 30 years: a better Blob. Whereas the original 1958 model, a rolling heap of silicone, did little more than wobble and eat, the updated Blob is infinitely more advanced. It can climb to the ceiling and plop down on anyone below. It can choose its victims mischievously, rather than on its predecessor's catch-as-catch-can basis. It can play practical jokes. And it can overtake, subdue and digest its prey right before the audience's very eyes. This is progress, after a fashion. So by any reasonable standard, Chuck Russell's current ''Blob'' is new and improved. It's a more professional effort in every way. The special effects look sickeningly good, and the actors show signs of being able to act, which could not be said of any members of the original cast - not even Steve McQueen, who was Steven McQueen then and appearing in his first major film role. Yet for reasons having nothing to do with merit, the 1958 film earned a place in history. The remake, enterprising as it is, won't do the same.

The original's very amateurishness had a lot to do with making it memorable. The utter ingenuousness of its small-town Americana remains astounding, and the inadvertent humor generated by the Blob itself -surely the silliest of all sci-fi creations in an era when silliness was king - is another major plus. Filmed on a very low budget in Pennyslvania, the first ''Blob'' is entirely without Hollywood polish. It's a funny, revealing, often dull and never frightening souvenir of the era in which it was made.

The new ''Blob,'' which opens today at the Criterion and other theaters, is very much a film of the moment. It is more violent than the original, more spectacular, more cynical, more patently commercial and more attentive to detail. The plot outline -which, like everything else about the original film, left plenty of room for improvement - remains similar, from the Blob's first arrival via meteor to its various rampages (in a doctor's office, in a movie theater, down the main street of the little town) to its by no means irreversible demise. But within those guidelines, just about everything else has changed.

Gone is the friendly, folksy atmosphere in which a clean-cut teen-ager (Mr. McQueen) joined forces with the grudgingly supportive local police to vanquish the mysterious creature. On the evidence of the new film, nice guys are clearly out of fashion. Donovan Leitch, as a wholesome-looking high-school football player, looks like the film's hero in its early scenes, but he is one of many characters who become very graphic Blob-bait. His cheerleader girlfriend (played by Shawnee Smith) and the town's sneering, motorcycle-riding outcast (Kevin Dillon) are left to battle the creature.

Fighting the Blob isn't so simple this time, since the screenplay by Mr. Russell and Frank Darabont adds hostile police, sinister Government scientists and one very peculiar clergyman (Del Close) to the man-versus-Blob dynamic. There are also jokes about condoms and some about medical insurance (the first Blob victim doesn't have any) thrown into the thoroughly contemporary mix. What emerges is a lively, grisly, better-than-average high-tech monster movie that devotes more energy to special effects than to drama.

Among the actors, Mr. Dillon does a good job of projecting a wounded heroism behind his ever-present sneer, and Jeffrey DeMunn makes the local sheriff a genial, reasonable fellow who is in no way prepared for the Blob's incursion. Candy Clark's salt-of-the-earth performance as a waitress comes closest to recalling the earlier film's atmosphere, and Miss Smith's cheerleader strikes the most modern chord. It is she, dressed for combat and furiously cursing the enemy, who proves the most formidable Blob-baiter of them all.